Anti-virus Software Goes Crazy With Screen Saver

Ask Jim

August 14, 2006|By JAMES COATES Chicago Tribune

Q: I have the screen saver on the Windows My Pictures slide show. The problem is that along with the picture slide show, I get a lot of clutter. Items such as McAfee's Security Center keep opening notification windows. I have done everything I know to do to delete this clutter without results.

-- Paul Broyles

A: Your computer keeps burping during those slide shows because various anti- virus and anti-spyware programs that you are running detect potential problems with one or maybe more of the photos that you have set the Windows screen saver to display.

You could stop this by disabling that McAfee protection, but that's too much like tossing out the baby with the binary bath water.

Any number of things could be identifying photos as suspects. To find possible problems, protective software looks for stuff such as file extensions, attachments and small bits of code written into image files. So you can fix this by either changing the folder in which Windows looks for images to provide slide shows or attempting to sanitize your pictures by loading them in editing software and then resaving them, which pretty much eliminates red flags.

You can load images one by one in the Microsoft Paint program, which can be found by clicking on Start, then All Programs, then Accessories. Once Paint is open, click on File and Open, then use the Save As command to rewrite the image as a plain picture.

To change the directory where photos are found for the slide shows, right-click with the cursor on the desktop, select Properties and then open the Screen Saver tab. Scroll down to the My Pictures Slideshow screen saver and then click Settings. This lets you change the time between image displays. Use the Browse button there to select other folders than the default My Pictures.

Q: I oftentimes receive forwarded e-mail messages that 90 percent of the time we enjoy. However, there's a drawback. The sender's forward is preceded by 20 to 30 e-mails that you need to scroll through until finally you see "the real thing." Is there a way one can eliminate these e-mail rosters and just keep the message itself?

-- Ofelia A. LeFranc-Gula

A: You can fix things so you don't cause this proble, but, for the most part, Ms. L., I fear it's the person who does the forwarding that creates these binary snowballs, in which each note dealing with a single topic includes quotations of all the previous postings with every forwarding.

As an AOL user, you can customize your mailbox so it doesn't include the entire text in each message. If everybody did this, of course, the problem you cite would be gone, but a lot of folks would complain. A great advantage of this constant repeating of text is that one always knows the context of what came earlier -- a big convenience for many, albeit a big headache for others.

Most e-mail programs include settings for dealing with whether past text is included and, if so, how much. In AOL, open your e-mail and then look for a button called Mail Option at the top of the display. Open that and then go to Set Email Preferences, where you will find a menu including one to either include all past text in replies and forwards or to just include "quoted text."

In the latter case, the user can use the mouse to select key passages from a note, and it will be added, instead of the whole shebang. This setting will stop the problem and let you take advantage of quoting crucial portions.

Nearly all e-mail programs make this feature optional. Look for the Options button, in most cases. In Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, the preference settings are found under the Tools menu in the main display.

Q: I just put two new hard drives in my computer. I had to format them, and then I reinstalled Windows XP. I tried to activate XP, and I received the message that I had activated it too many times and that I had other options available to take care of the problem.

In the same message, it sent me to a page where XP was on sale. I already spent a bunch of bucks on the one I have. How do I convince the good folks at Microsoft that I don't have a pirate copy and want to activate and keep on using the one I have?

-- Wayne Mercier

A: Here's your answer, Mr. M.: 866-234-6020. That's the phone number of the Windows XP free support staff who will be able to show you the way to explain verbally your situation, which is caused whenever somebody drastically changes a computer's hardware with extra hard drives, etc.